There is this wonderful moment in Pat Murphy's
Nora, where after going to the cinema in Trieste, Nora
is roused to find Joyce and tell him of her romantic past, a past
immortalized in "The Dead" as the exchange between Gretta and
Michael Furey. As Murphy's film makes clear, the monumentalization
of Joyce's encounter with Nora's past, an expansion, one might say,
of a local moment, is mirrored in Murphy's own cinematic act,
contrived to be at once self-reflexive about the impact of the
movies on lives and also to display such moments of artistic
appropriation. Her own, even. Murphy visualizes for us the
continental setting for Joyce's writing in a way that little else
does. The Irish is of course there, but out of focus, as it were.
The film replaces our expectation of Irishness with our
anticipation of the Joyce an familiar—lines from the city, work,
music, dramatic moments, that Scylla and Charybdis style, have come
to represent the life. But it also surprises us, I think, by
marking the refusal of the work and the life to be contained within
the melody of the Irish idiom. Joyce and Nora speak in Italian
without fanfare. The children's names are, well, positively
cosmopolitan.

Much has been made of Joyce's self-designed exile and its
connection with his modernism. Little Chandler's lament, "If you
wanted to succeed, you had to go away. You could do nothing in
Dublin"—has been well rehearsed. It's important to see the remark
as both rationalization and fancy. Exile was a constitutional
state. Being away was in some sense to be at home. The work's
changing readership is reflected in the shifts in both Joyce's
geographical and critical status: he was situated first as
internationalist, modernist, then Irish postcolonial, now
cosmopolitan. Joyce needed to expel himself from Ireland to stick,
as it were, and then the critics had to put the Irish back to get
him unstuck from an untenable apoliticism, to rescue him from his
highness—his high modernism, that is. Joyce's cosmopolitanism is
tricky, not only because the category itself is shifty, but because
it may be associated with a changing Dublin, one that accommodates
varying, even contradictory views, one that may become
unrecognizable in Joycean terms, making it necessary to read the
novel to recover the city, as he predicted. Cosmopolitanism
threatens a kind of erasure of the particular city; it privileges
the urban as counter, which is the insistent space of the Joycean
familiar.

As I have made clear in previous work, for me the locus of
Joyce's cosmopolitanism has been in his Jewish figures, the
quintessential deracinated urbanites. As Vince Cheng reminds us in
his discussion of Joyce on this topic, Jews were thought to be the
sine qua non of cosmopolitanism in the Europe of the
late nineteenth and roughly first half of the twentieth centuries,
a "rootless cosmopolitanism," as it is better known. And as I have
also argued, this stereotype fed Joyce's idea of the symbolic
expansiveness of the Jewish figure, maybe even, given his encounter
with Jews on the continent in particular, provided him a gateway to
a cosmopolitanism of the future. The argument has also been
variously made that Jews are Joyce's proxy for the Irish, but more
accurately, I would argue, for his Dubliners, who are
insufficiently Irish by the standards of Irish authenticity, more
aptly upheld, let's say, in George Moore's "rural" The
Untilled Field (1903), roundly dismissed by Joyce for its
sentimentality. The urban is always a kind of enclave in national
space, insistent and alien, and in the case of Joyce's Dublin,
fully occupied by the English.

Despite what has been revealed as the historical pairing of the
Irish and the Jews, so often the argument seems a kind of
throwaway, a connection that doesn't say enough, or, in keeping
with that trope in Joyce's novel, is a blind. A misapprehension.
Maybe even an accusation. "Throwaway," of course, is the name of
the winning horse of the Ascot Gold Cup on 16 June 1904. Bloom's
association with...

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